BRIT Review

This election will go down as one of the most challenging and oddest in history. After discovering eight weeks constitutes a 'snap' election it was framed as a 'back me over Brexit' by the PM. She needed a mandate to negotiate with Brussels and other parties were trying to manouever and sabotage her efforts to get the best deal for Britain. Read more

Outside of world war foreign policy has rarely looked more perilous. President Putin is no longer bashful about his desire to become a ‘major player’ in the Middle East, a region where hellish fires continue to rage fiercely. NATO and Russia are playing out old Cold War grudges across the former Soviet republics, and the pressure cooker like atmosphere on the Korean peninsula has increased tenfold. Read more

Between 2001 and 2009, exponentially increasing mass migration was encouraged as part of a ‘deliberate’ political project by Labour Party leaders and the Performance and Innovation Institute think tank to, ‘rub the Right’s nose in diversity’ and catapult Britain into multicultural modernity. So claimed Andrew Neather, a speech writer who worked for Tony Blair and the Home Office, in his now immortalised interview with the Evening Standard. Read more

The 2014 independence referendum heightened political engagement in Scotland like never before. Despite the majority vote to remain within the United Kingdom, the question of independence continues to dominate Scotland’s political landscape. Read more

The leaking of Labour’s Manifesto prompted a plethora of comparisons to former Labour Party Leader, Michael Foot’s 1983 Manifesto. Whether or not comparisons are valid, this is a discussion for another day. Regardless, it certainly highlights a curiously interesting link between the two elections. After all, Michael Foot faced then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher in that election, who Theresa May has been compared to regularly since her appointment as Prime Minister. Both elections also mark a Conservative Party that has been pushing further right wing and a Labour Party that has been pushing left wing. Read more

We currently live in a world in which long-term conflicts and terrorism are capable of destabilising political structures on a global scale. The effect of the rise of ISIS, the wars in Syria and Iraq, and global terrorism upon the election of Donald Trump and the Brexit vote are plain to see. The only way to genuinely combat these issues is through clear, effective foreign policy. The “strong and stable” mantra doesn’t cut it here. Read more

My apologies if my message isn’t more upbeat to begin with. I am a foreigner, and I have only been living in the UK for the last year and a bit. Brexit took me by surprise, like for the many who were surprised to learn what Brexit really implies after the referendum. Read more

I attended one of the counts for the Scottish Parliamentary Elections in 2016 where, not uncommonly, I witnessed the Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) holding onto one of their seats with a stable majority. However, what was not common that evening was seeing the Conservative candidate’s vote share increase so much that she leapt to second position on the constituency vote. Read more